


To Know You're Alive

by Mohini



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Withdrawal, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Suicidal Thoughts, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-05-25 06:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14970803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mohini/pseuds/Mohini
Summary: Not for the first time, Steve wanted very much to track down and very slowly murder everyone who had been a part of making Bucky into the Winter Soldier.





	1. One

“Stevie?”

All the oxygen in the room was sucked out in the two syllables that were rasping though the phone. He didn’t know the number, but he damn well knew that voice. He would know that voice anywhere, had known it in his sickly, pitiful youth, had known it in his dreams and his nightmares since he woke up in a world where nothing fit where it belonged anymore, especially not Steve Rogers.

“Bucky?” he asked, afraid to break the spell and wake up from what must certainly be a dream of some kind, never mind that he didn’t remember falling asleep.

“Stevie, I’m scared. I’m so scared Stevie. I’ve done a lot of bad things. Really, really bad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Stevie…”

“Where are you?” Steve cut in, because he was absolutely certain that he heard something in the middle of the grating, raw voice. Something that sounded entirely too much like the slide of a weapon as it chambered a round.

“I won’t hurt you again, Stevie. I’m so sorry, so fucking sorry.”

“Buck. Put the gun down. Tell me where you are.”

“Stevie,” the voice whispered again, and there it was, that tiny hitch that Steve had heard a thousand times. Bucky was crying and trying hard to keep anyone from knowing it. 

“Buck. Listen to me right now. You do what you’re thinking of and you will hurt me. Do you hear me? Tell me where you are and I will come to you. Put the safety on. Now.”

“Stevie,” and the voice wasn’t even trying to hide the tears now, breathing ragged and choked.

“I’m going to walk you through this. Drop the mag,” Steve demanded in a voice that was a lot more in control than he felt. There was a dull, metallic thud as the magazine was removed from the weapon.

“You’re doing great, Buck. Clear the chamber for me. Not tactically. On the floor.”

Another metallic plink as the bullet was ejected and fell to the ground.

“Remove the slide.”

A faint whisk of metal on metal as the slide was pulled free, then dropped.

“Barrel next.”

That same metal on metal swishing sound, and a faint clang as it, too, hit the floor.

“That’s good, Buck. You’re doing real good. Tell me where to find you, please. If you can’t, just activate the GPS on the phone and I can find you myself.”

“Red Hook,” Bucky whispered. If Steve’s hearing had been any less super human than it was, he would never have caught the address that followed that admission. Instead, he ran from his apartment and down the six blocks to the building practically within throwing distance where Bucky was holed up in a studio apartment.

“I’m at your door, Buck. Can you open it for me?”

“Stevie,” Bucky whimpered, and Steve took that to mean that the door no longer needed to remain on its hinges.

He found Bucky huddled on a couch that looked like it had last been cleaned several decades past, his clothes a rumpled mess, a tac vest mostly still on him, and what looked to be a liquor store worth of gin bottles on the floor. He was still clutching the partially disassembled Beretta in one hand, and Steve gently pried it from his fingers. Bucky looked up at him, eyes brimming with tears.

“I’ve got you, Buck,” Steve told him, tossing the weapon aside and wrapping his arms around the definitely no longer threatening looking Bucky Barnes, former master assassin and currently suicidal and terrified vet on the wrong end of a 70 year deployment.

Bucky shook in his arms for ages, apologies falling from his lips in waves of self hate and guilt.  Through it all, Steve held him tight, stroked his hand up and down his back, and whispered over and over that he wasn’t going to be alone in this again. When the man in his arms went abruptly limp, Steve’s immediate reaction was utter panic. Then it occurred to him that Bucky had done this before, back during the war. He was an intense fighter, all adrenaline and no fear, until the moment the adrenaline departed and he dropped like a rock, shaking and puking and on more than one occasion, fainting into unconsciousness.

Fueled by long dormant memory, Steve held the other man, carefully checking him over as he had when they were many years younger. Bucky was thinner than he had been in DC. His cheeks a little hollow and the circles beneath his eyes deep and dark. Listening carefully to his breathing, Steve could hear the faintest wheeze. He made mental note to find Banner and ask him to check that when he could get Bucky to a rational place where such a thing could be considered. It didn’t take long before Bucky stirred, eyelids fluttering and then opening wide, his body instantly tensed as he flung himself from Steve’s grip and sprinting to a door that turned out to house a tiny bathroom.

He crashed to the floor above the toilet and retched so hard the sound made Steve’s gut clench in sympathy. Old habits and all that being what they are, though, Steve knelt beside him, a hand rubbing circles on his low back, the other reaching to support Bucky’s forehead and keep it from dipping into the bowl. When it was over, Bucky slumped sideways into his arms, not even attempting to support himself. It was then that Steve realized that even for another serum enhanced more than human, Bucky was running really, really hot. 

“Buck? This is going to sound crazy, but can you get sick?”

“Just did,” Bucky replied, eyes still closed. 

“No, no, I mean, actually sick. Fever, chills, that sort of thing?”

“Oh, yeah, immune system’s not as good as yours. Better than most, but I’m not totally immune to everything.”

“Are you sick now?”

“Depends on the definition you’re using. I’m withdrawing, I think. Not sure, been wiped too many times, but I think I’ve done it before. The drugs they used to keep me compliant, they’re addictive as fuck. Urgh, lemme up Stevie, gonna hurl again,” Bucky explained, before rising on shaking knees and clinging to the toilet as he dry heaved.

By the time he fell back into Steve’s lap again, he was limp as a kitten and drenched in sweat.

“Is there anything I can do?” Steve asked. Bucky shook his head miserably, eyes closed and breath coming in shallow pants.

 Illness Steve he knew. Intimately.  But this was another animal altogether. He was aware that it was a vague possibility. Natasha had explained to him that the Red Room had kept her amped up on stimulants to keep her sharp and vicious. When he asked her if that was what they did to Bucky, she had laughed.

_Cap, honey, that man never needed a stimulant in his life. They would have given him shit to keep him tamped down enough to control._

The words echoed in his brain now, and he suddenly realized that even though he didn’t have a clue how to handle this, he knew someone who would.

“Bucky? Can I call someone to help? Someone who knows how to keep it quiet?”

“You can call the devil himself if you think they’ll help, Stevie,” Bucky whined.

The phone call took a matter of minutes.  Natasha was calling out to alert them she was there less than an hour later.

“Sasha,” she greeted Bucky, who looked up at her with unfocused eyes and nodded.

“Natka?” he murmured.

“In the flesh. Do you know what they were giving you? And how long you’ve been cut off?”

“Reserves in the arm ran out 48 hours ago. Benzos, mostly,” he murmured.

“I’m guessing that explains the bits of Beretta all over the living space. You usually suicidal or just when you’re crashing?”

“S’why I have a dead drop command,” Bucky hissed out before dragging himself back over the toilet rim to puke up air and pain.

“That command still the same?” Natasha asked him when he finished and was once again lying against Steve.

“Mmhmm,” he grumbled, eyes closed tight. The words had been taught to Natasha when she was barely more than a child, passed from his scrawled handwriting to her hand in an effort to protect her in what small way he could.

“Cap, pick him up and let’s get him off this floor. I’ve got the stuff to stop this, but I don’t have enough space in here to maneuver.”

Steve didn’t ask questions, just gathered Bucky into a awkward cradle hold and carried him to the unspeakably gross couch, kicking liquor bottles out of his way as he went.

Once they were on it, Bucky’s head pillowed in Steve’s lap, a mop bucket within reach - and where Natasha had found that Steve didn’t care to know - Bucky’s tac vest and shirt were removed to bare a chest that was both perfectly muscled and horribly scarred. Not for the first time, Steve wanted very much to track down and very slowly murder everyone who had been a part of making Bucky into the Winter Soldier 

Natasha produced an IV line out of seemingly nowhere, swiping a patch of skin on Bucky’s forearm and inserting with expert care.  She injected the contents of two different syringes into it before hooking up a saline bag from what Steve now realized was a sizeable duffle beside the couch. 

“Sasha, let me know when the valium hits, hmm?” she told him, squeezing the bag with one hand and slipping a syringe of something else into a port on the line with the other.

“What are you giving him?” Steve asked, staring.

“The first two were an antiemetic to calm his stomach and an opiate to ease out the cramping. Muscle relaxants won’t work on his system. This last one is valium. It’s a benzodiazepine, not as strong as what was in the arm, but probably close enough to give him some relief.”

Right on cue, Bucky sighed in relief. “Thank you, Natka.”

“Don’t thank me yet, my old friend. That’s not going to hold you for long. I need to get at least this liter of fluids in you to get your blood pressure back up. Do you remember coming off in the past? Is there a way that works?”

“Just sick. Don’t remember. I, the trackers, they, alert, I think, when I run out, the arm, damnit, can’t fucking think…” he hissed, the words in a rush of garbled syllables. Steve brushed fingertips over his face, shushing him with the tip of his index finger against his lips.

“Shhhh, Bucky, shhh,” Steve murmured to him, “We’ve got you now.”


	2. Chapter 2

_Cold._  Everything is so cold. His teeth are clenched tight to keep himself from making a continuous chattering racket. Someone’s calling his name, but he’s sinking and there’s so much cold. It hurts, the cold seeping into his bones, and all he can think is that it will stop soon, it has to stop soon.

 

There are hands on him, and his name is being repeated, sharp and loud. He tries to pull away. Hands hurt when he’s so cold, everything hurts, and he just wants it to be over. They forgot the sedatives again, or maybe they just didn’t want to bother with them, because he can feel every oversensitive nerve in his body, freezing, burning.

 

His stomach lurches, and something creeps up his throat, thick, painful, and he can’t clear it away, is too trapped to roll, so he spits desperately as more acid joins the mass in his mouth. Something pries his jaw wide, and it’s all he can do not to wail because he doesn’t want the bite guard that will cut his gums and scrape his tongue raw.

 

He bites down hard when there is something between his lips. Someone yelps, and there is dim satisfaction that he harmed a handler, that he resisted, again. A pinpoint of bright stinging pain in his arm, the one made of flesh, not the metal devil entwined with his being, that one doesn’t feel, not in that way, and then the cold is gone. Everything is gone.

~*~

 

Natasha leans back on her heels, still crouched by the now still and silent man before her. Steve is watching her, searching her face for some indication of what they should do now. It’s been days since Bucky contacted him, days since they pulled him out of a crap apartment in Red Hook and brought him to this little house in the middle of nowhere that Natasha assured him no one knows about. It’s rigged with enough perimeter alarms and defensive traps that no one is going to be able to get there without losing vital parts in the process. When he asked about some of the more creative options, she muttered something about them being on Clint’s property, whatever that means.

 

Bucky’s been fading in and out of consciousness most of the day. He’s terrified and screaming when he’s awake, shivering and crying when he’s asleep, and only really resting when Natasha pumps heavy drugs into him. Steve doesn’t want to know what she’s using. Whatever it is, it silences Bucky within moments of injection. She used the verbal dead drop command during the first day here. Never again.  One snarled word of Russian and Bucky had crumpled to the floor, limp and barely breathing for hours.

 

“I’m calling Banner,” Natasha tells him.

 

Steve nods. This is going so far beyond even Natasha’s considerable skills that it’s past time to call in help. They can’t risk Bruce being there physically. Bucky’s a hazard even to him and Natasha. Neither of them want to know what he would do to someone he doesn’t consider a friend, however strangely he seems to be defining that one. The Russian word he had offered in explanation translated to something between comrade in arms and family. 

 

Nat leaves the room to make the call, and returns with a grim expression on her face. “Bruce thinks we need to let him come through it without the sedatives. He says we’re resetting the programming when we knock him out.”

 

Steve stares at her, then reaches for Bucky’s hand and holds it in his own.

 

“I’ll stay with him,” he tells her. Natasha is enhanced, in some way none of them fully understand, but she’s not as durable as Steve.

 

“You’ve probably got another hour or so before he comes back up.”

 

“Thanks,” Steve murmurs, one hand idly tracing up and down Bucky’s arm as he settles in for the wait.


End file.
